I VICTOR SERGE IDOL OF THE ANTI-TROTSKYITES

Poynton and Wilmstow out. 'Several friends have asked us what Victor Serge's relationship is to the Fourth International. We are obliged to reply that it is the relationship of an opponent. Ever since his appearance out side the Soviet Union, Victor Serge has done nothing but change positions.

'There is no other way to define changeability". Not define his political position one single question has he presented clear or distinct proposals, rebuttals or arguments He has invariably, though, sup. ported those who have moved away from the Fourth International, whether towards the right or the left. Surprising everyone, Victor Serge declared in an official letter that he was joining the POUM.

"This without ever having attempted to reply to criticism of the POUM as a centrist organization that has played a miserable role in the Spanish revolution. He flirted with the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists in spite of their treacherous role in the Spanish revolution ... he repeated on several occasions that his differences with us were of "secondary" character. To the direct question of why he did not then collaborate with the Fourth International rather than with its rabid opponents, he never came up with an answer.

'All this deprived his politics of any consistency whatever and turned it into a system of personal combinations, if not intrigues. If Victor Serge speaks of his "sympathies" with the Fourth International .. (he has) in mind not the real International, but a mythical one created by his imagination in his own likeness and necessary to him only as a cover for his opportunist or adventurist policies neither the Russian section nor the International as whole takes any responsibility for the politics of Victor Serge.' So wrote Trotsky in December; 1938. And, after Trotsky's death, Serge proved to be even more 'changeable'.

For Serge's final alignment was not with the Fourth International of Leon Trotsky, but the Fourth Republic of Charles de Gaulle.

Six days before his death, in November 1947, Serge wrote Malrao, one of the most personal letter to André prominent figures of de Gaulle's 'Rassemblement du Peuple Francais'.

Part of the letter ran:

wish to tell you that I judge the political position you have adopted (i.e. joining Gaulle-IG) to be courageous and probably reasonable; if I myself were in France, I should be among those socialists who support collaboration with the movement of which you are a member. The electoral victory of your movement, which foresaw, but whose magnitude surprised me, was in my opinion a great step towards the immediate safety of France.' This final crossing to the side of counter-revolution caused considerable embarrassment to his English translator and editor, Peter Sedgwick-a prominent member of the anticommunist International In an appendix to Serge's 'Memoirs of a Revolutionary' published in this country in 1963 - Sedgwick explained that, after all, this wasn't a public statement.

Apparently, it would have been all right for Serge to support de Gaulle if only it hadn't leaked out!

Then, Sedgwick claims, Serge supported de Gaulle in order to save France from Stalinism. It is, of course, totally impermissible to fight Stalinism by lining up with the far right, the most rabid representatives of the bourgeoisie.

The fact that this is all right by Sedgwick could say much about the possible future development of his own organization.

But in 1947, of course, de Gaulle had just kicked the Stalinists out of the French government—not in order to save France' from them (they were indeed only too anxious to continue collaboration with the General), but as a precondition for the receipt of Marshall Aid from the United States.

Sedgwick, however, carries distortion of history even further than this. Arguing that Serge might have changed his position if he hadn't died, Sedgewick declares:

'If Lenin had died in April 1917 on the sealed train provided for his return to Russia by German imperialism: or if Trotsky had died in December 1939 the instant after consenting to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, it would be suspected that two more subversives had made their peace with the old order."

This is breath-taking in its deceit. Lenin and Trotskyhistorical figures beside whom Serge is a pygmy-were prepared to utilize capitalist institutions in order to overthrow it. There is no suggestion that Serge's letter to Malraux was a means of fighting Gaullism.

The incident of Lenin's sealed train journey is well enough known to need no further explanation- -though it is interesting that Sedgwick raises the ghost of the old 'German agent' slander.

And Sedgwick's claims to historical scholarship should make him familiar with Trotsky's position on the invitation …TO appear before the Dies Committee (it is noW available again in The Writings of Leon Trotsky 19391940', Merit Publishers).

Trotsky agreed to appear only on his own terms in order to warn the American working class dangers Stalinism.

He explicitly declared that he was against the use of the instruments of the bourgeois state against Stalinism and that he would give no evidence on the alleged 'un-Americanism' of the US Communist Party. As a result his invitation to speak was withdrawn.

How can either of these actions by unsullied revolutionaries be equated with Serge's declaration that if he had lived in France he would have collaborated with de Gaulle?

Sedgwick is concerned to whitewash Victor Serge because Serge's anti - communism appeals to the International Socialism tendency.

It is no accident that Serge was closer to the anarcho-syndicalists in the Spanish revolution than he was to Trotskyism. And anarchism has an out as He had written his organ 'L'Anarchie' 1911: I am At periods in Russia, Serge towards Bolsheviks. in his introduction 'Year One of the (reviewed yesterday, him as saying in munist no longer exercises a tariat'.

this particular Bolshevik rule, hastens point out:

which had of millions in Russia and the world in given way to monopoly Sedgwick, is anxious door even more specu'A third group of critics of Bolshevik history has attracted attention. These would share Serge's chronological focus, in concentrating on developments in Soviet Russia during the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik assumption of authority, but would offer a radically-distinct explanation for the tendencies towards political repression, centralization and monopoly that are evident in the practice of Lenin's party as early as 1918.

'Such writers as Naom Chomsky, the Cohn-Bendit brothers and Paul Cardan are inclined to ascribe the Bolshevik expropriation of the Soviets not to the sheer pressure of historical events but to the conceptual deformities within Bolshevism... pre-dating the October Revolution (and) traced back to Lenin's centralizing politics in the 1902-1903 split with the Mensheviks.' Better still, it might, says Sedgwick, be traced "elements in the philosophy of the by Marian state as developed Marx himself in the old controversy with anarchism."

What attracts the IS to Serge is not his better side-that he did, however romantically, support the Revolution, join the Left Opposition and suffer exile under Stalin, but his opening the door to rejection leanings towards anarchism, of Trotskyism, Leninism and Marxism in its entirety.

In fact, his stand with the Left Opposition lends some 'authority' to these ideas. It is indeed, particularly 'useful' for the anti-Trotskyists when they can find a survivor of the Left Opposition who steadfastly refused to join the Fourth International.

The state capitalists seize upon Victor Serge not for his historical writings, which have a place, but for his fundamental opposition to revolutionary organization and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. These are the historical requirements of the working class and such are anathema to Sedgwick and his ilk.

Appendix to 'Memoirs of a Sedgwick's introduction to 'Year One of the Revolution'